‘We gotta look out for ourselves!’
Self-loathing foamed up into his gullet.
He steeled himself.
‘Ourselves!’
‘Jesus God.’
With an effort Klein steadied his own heaving chest. Then he bent down and hooked his arm round Claude’s waist and dragged him through the gateway into cellblock D.
FIFTEEN
VICTOR GALINDEZ FLUNG himself on top of the burning guard in the yard and tried to smother the flames.
Burning cloth and skin and hair filled his nose and mouth with acrid fumes. The guard writhed and screamed underneath him. Each time Galindez beat out a patch of flame the gas-soaked shirt reignited. Galindez tore the cloth apart, wrenching it in handfuls from the guard’s chest. Strips of skin came away with it. The guard was still screaming. Galindez suddenly recognised him: it was Perkins.
‘Galindez!’
Galindez turned. Sung stood beside him aiming a fire extinguisher. Galindez rolled aside and Sung hosed Perkins down with a white cloud of carbon dioxide foam. A few seconds later the fire was out. Galindez, on his hands and knees, stared at the injured man. Perkins’s scalp was a scorched, crinkled cap of burnt hair and blistered skin. His eyelids glistened with fluid exuding from the delicate, damaged skin. Galindez had never seen a man burned before. A visceral horror lurched through his anus and balls. Perkins opened his mouth and Galindez bent forward to hear him.
‘The men,’ croaked Perkins.
He paused, took a wheezing breath, spoke again.
‘They’re still in there.’
Galindez found tears springing to his eyes. Terribly mutilated as he was Perkins still thought of the men in his charge. Galindez looked up at Sung.
‘You got to get him out of here.’
Rifle shots crackled from the North Wall. Galindez grabbed Perkins by one arm. Sung dropped the fire extinguisher and grabbed the other arm. They hauled Perkins to his feet.
‘You got to walk, man, you understand?’ Galindez shouted into Perkins’s shrivelled ear. ‘You got to walk.’
Perkins nodded feebly. The radios on their hips squawked and crackled frantically.
‘This is Bill Cletus. All officers report to the main gates. Get out of there. Repeat. Get the fuck out. All of you out. Now.’
The message continued, Cletus carefully restating the single command: get out. Now. Galindez looked towards B block, then at Sung.
‘Get going,’ said Galindez. ‘Go!’
Sung draped Perkins’s arm over his shoulders and wrapped an arm round his waist. The Korean was tough. He would get Perkins clear. Sung nodded to him. Galindez nodded back.
Sung and Perkins began to stagger away across the yard.
Galindez realised that he had picked up the fire extinguisher, that its weight, like the weight of some dread obligation, was pulling on his arm.
Perkins’s last thought had been for the men.
Galindez clapped his free hand to his eyes. Mother of God. His mind swam with faces. His wife, Elisa. His children. The long journey from Salvador to Panama City. The longer one from Panama to Laredo. The struggle and the pain they had gone through to get what they had. And to accept all that they had left behind them. All that they had lost. All these things scorched his mind in one compressed and terrible flame of awareness. It had cost them so much. Only God knew how much and how much it was worth. And only God knew what he had to do now to keep his immortal soul.
The radio still squawked at his hip but Galindez couldn’t hear it. Nor the rifles high up on the walls.
Perkins’s last thought had been for the men.
Two hundred of them.
Galindez dragged his hand away from his face. The choice was no longer his.
Victor Galindez sprinted towards the rear gate and sallyport of cellblock B.
Perkins had opened the rear gate in order to escape and had unwittingly caused the fireball that had engulfed him. Galindez, the extinguisher bashing into his leg, staggered into the doorway and stopped. Before his appalled gaze the interior of the cellblock was hell. Galindez thought he had known hell, in the interrogation cells in Salvador, but now for the first time the word was real. This was the hell the Jesuits had imprinted on his growing childhood mind. The central walkway was a river of fire, fiercest at the far end and petering out about halfway down the block in the scorched trail of the fireball that ended at his feet. Dense black fumes filled the glass vault, blocking out the sun and turning the whole block into a death house.
The tiers to his right were empty; those to his left full, squirming with terrified inmates. A few yards away men reached through the bars and screamed for help as they saw him. Further down the block the steel grilles were silent as the prisoners took what shelter they could in the rear of their cells. The cell doors couldn’t be opened from the small guard’s station at this the rear gate, only from the cellblock office at the inner gate. Galindez ran into the guard station pulling out his keys. He opened a steel locker in one corner. It was crammed with clothes, bottles of suntan lotion, porn mags, soda bottles, odd items of sports gear. Perkins was a slob. Galindez hauled the rubbish out until he found what he wanted: a regulation mask for use in tear gas situations. As he ran back out something caught his eye. Leaning against the wall was a pair of mops and buckets left by the cons who’d swabbed the walkway that morning. He dashed over. One of the buckets was still full of murky water. Galindez set the extinguisher down, removed his cap, took the bucket and drenched himself the best he could. He jammed the cap back down over his hair. Hoarse shouts came from the tiers as the men understood what Galindez was about to attempt.
‘Muthafucka! Muthafucka!’
‘Fuck! Fuck!’
‘Go for it, man!’
‘Go you sucka, go!’
‘Fuck you, man! Fuck you!’
Galindez ran forward hauling the extinguisher in his left hand. As the movement tore sheets of skin from his palm he realised he’d burned his hands ripping off Perkins’s shirt. He squeezed tighter, attacking the pain. As he got to within a few yards of the river of fire and he felt its heat on his face he stopped and set the extinguisher down. There would be no oxygen in there. He took half a dozen breaths, heaving in and out as deeply as he could. The shouts of the convicts, more frenzied than ever, were muted by the crackle of flames. Galindez pulled on the gas mask. Through the thick glass lenses the flames were distorted. He aimed the long black cone-shaped nozzle of the fire extinguisher at the ground just ahead of his feet, muttered a last prayer and switched on the white spray.
Victor Galindez took a deep breath, held it, and waded forward into the flames.
Crouching low, moving the white cloud from the funnel in a short repetitive arc in front of his feet, Galindez strode forward in a fire-free pocket of airless space. Too fast and he ran into the flames; too slow and he’d never make it to the other end of the walkway. After each step the flames closed in again behind him. His back began to burn. He felt the damp hair at the edges of his cap hiss and shrivel against his scalp. Steady. Steady. One step, then another. Inside the mask sweat streamed into his eyes and steamed over the lenses. Don’t breathe. No oxygen out there. The roar of the funnel and the fire filled his ears. Now walking blind. Steady. Steady. Planting one foot down ahead of the other, hoping he was moving in a straight line, hoping, doubting, praying, expecting each moment to find himself blundering into the bars of one of the cages. If he did that he’d be finished. He wanted to turn back. He didn’t dare. He wanted to run. He didn’t dare. He wanted to breathe. He didn’t dare. Don’t turn. Don’t run. Don’t breathe. He had lost track of distance and time. Seconds were hours. Yet he had to be close. He had to be close. His shoulder rammed into something hard. He turned his back into the hardness. They weren’t bars. Smooth and hard but not dense. Glass. Glass. He was past the cages. The heat was intense. He swept the foam in a semi-circle around his feet and slid sideways with the hard smoothness against his spine. His head was explo
ding with heat and claustrophobia and the effort of holding his breath. Suddenly the hardness behind him disappeared and he stumbled.
His back had been against the glass shell of the inner gate office and he’d stumbled half-through the sliding door which was ajar. He wrenched the door open. He was inside. He slammed the door shut. The extinguisher fell from his hand. The stale air erupted from his chest and he clung to the wall, heaving. Smoke. Smoke. More smoke than oxygen but the mask protected his lungs. He was still almost blind. He reeled across the room from memory, fumbling in his pocket, pulled out his keys. His hands found the control unit for the tiered cell doors. By touch he jammed his pass key into the panel and twisted. The keyboard awaited the appropriate code number. 101757. He prayed he’d remembered it correctly and pulled off the mask to see. Smoke assailed his throat and eyes. He glanced at the keyboard and hammered in the numbers. There was a pause that stretched out into eternity. Mother of Jesus.
A slow rising rumble and a crash of steel on stone thundered above the noise of the fire. The tier doors were open. Dimly he heard desperate shouts of relief. Galindez sagged against the control panel. Each breath was a wire brush soaked with Clorox scouring out his lungs. He dragged the mask back on, shoved himself away, grabbed the fire extinguisher. He slid back the glass door and paused on the threshold. Through foggy lenses he saw a man wrapped in a wet sheet stagger past, plunging towards the atrium. The yard was better, thought Galindez. The yard was safer. At least he could reach the infirmary from there. More men crowded past the doorway, heading into the interior of the prison. The yard was safer. But he couldn’t face the fire a second time. He followed the fleeing men.
Five metres later he burst free of the blaze and into the light from the great central dome. He dropped the extinguisher and fell to his knees, tearing the mask from his face. Running legs passed before his eyes. Sounds of violence and chaos.
As Galindez raised his head to take his bearings, something hard and heavy smashed into the back of his head.
And the violent chaos turned black.
SIXTEEN
IN CELLBLOCK D the frenzy of destruction had already begun. The great majority of the men could have had no forewarning of Agry’s blitzkrieg and yet to a man, as if acting on some preprogrammed instinctive impulse, they fell to their work of dismantling the prison within moments of the opportunity presenting itself. They attacked the ageing masonry, the woodwork, the light fittings, the furniture in their cells, even the stone flags of the walkway, with any implement they could find, anything they could rip away and grab onto and swing. Water poured from dozens of cells, from smashed faucets and blocked toilets deliberately flushed, and fell in glittering cascades from the upper tiers. Torn sheets and the stuffing from disembowelled mattresses floated through the air. And noise, noise. Of mindless damage and massive rage stored too long and finally released.
Klein walked through this Armageddon stony-faced.
Behind him Claude Toussaint stumbled along in a blank-eyed daze. Klein pulled Claude along ground tier. Convicts leered at Claude as he passed. None of them tried to harm him despite the colour of his skin. Klein stopped outside Agry’s cell and jerked his head for Claude to go inside.
Claude stared at him. ‘Take me with you,’ he said.
‘Wait for Agry,’ said Klein. ‘You’ll be safe enough here.’
‘I’m scared,’ said Claude.
Klein looked at his face. A pleading child stared back at him. Klein thought of Vinnie Lopez. Same age. Twenty-two. Klein forced himself to harden his heart. He needed the steelworks and ice more than ever. He shook his head.
‘You’re on your own, Claude. If you cling to me Agry will come down hard on both of us.’ He put his hand on the nape of Claude’s neck and squeezed it gently. ‘Look, I don’t believe Agry wants to kill you. If you can endure what he does to you, you can survive this thing. We both can. You understand? Endure.’
After a moment Claude nodded.
‘I’d best get dressed,’ said Claude.
Klein suddenly realised exactly what ‘endure’ involved for Claude. He took his hand from Claude’s neck. Klein swallowed. Claude turned and walked through the muslin sheet into Agry’s cell without looking back.
Klein strode back to the spiral staircase without catching anyone’s eyes and climbed up to second tier. He shoved two men out of the way as they clattered down the steps past him. He waded through the wreckage accumulating on the catwalk. Some men sat quietly in their cells, hoping to be ignored, praying that there were no outstanding grudges held against them. When Klein reached his own billet he took his shaving mirror from the wall and propped it on the floor between the bars, facing the stairs he’d just climbed so that he had a view of anyone approaching along the catwalk. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the pistol he’d taken from Grauerholz. He swung out the cylinder: five rounds. Jesus Christ. Klein lowered the hammer of the gun on the live cartridge next to the spent shell. He’d have four shots in sequence then the blank to remind him he had only one round left. Maybe he’d want it for himself. He put the gun away. He clenched his teeth. This was as far as he was going. Anyone coming through that door was dead. Anyone who fell bleeding and weeping for help on his threshold could lie there until they died. He wasn’t moving from his hole until this riot burned itself out and he was free. Not for anyone. From the floor by the door the piece of tape on his mirror caught his eye.
NOT MY FUCKING BUSINESS
Ray Klein slid his cell door shut and lay down on his bunk to wait.
SEVENTEEN
WARDEN HOBBES STOOD at the north window of his office and stared out at his prison. In the midday sun its fabulous geometry seemed roofed in burnished gold.
Smoke drifted from the rear gate of cellblock B.
The occasional rifle still cracked from the towers.
In the yard no one moved and it was empty save for the bodies of several wounded men. All the bodies were clothed in blue denim.
Hobbes knew not what was going on inside the prison, though he could guess.
Behind him the telephone on his desk started ringing.
Hobbes ignored it.
For the first time in an infinity of time his mind was empty of thoughts, of words, of notions. Time past and time future were finally forged together in this most momentous of times present.
Hobbes looked at his watch.
By the testimony of the guard in the West Wall watchtower it was just twenty-three minutes since Sonny Weir had been dragged, screaming and bleeding, from the builder’s yard. That was all the time it had taken for absolute order to succumb to absolute anarchy.
The telephone rang on and Hobbes ignored it.
This wasn’t a moment to be contaminated with triviality. It was a moment of history. More than that: a historic moment. It deserved, from him at least, a few seconds of sombre contemplation.
The phone rang on; and Hobbes ignored it.
After all, for the first time in one hundred and four years, Green River State Penitentiary had been placed, and placed entire, in the hands of its inmates – that they themselves might use it as they pleased.
PART II
THE RIVER
EIGHTEEN
NEV AGRY KNEW he couldn’t trust Claudine any further than he could shove his dick up her ass and in every sense that wasn’t quite as far as he would’ve liked.
On the other hand where was the sense in having a woman you could trust all the way? Jesus, none at all and Agry could testify to that from his own experience. The single worst year of his life, including all the hard time he’d done in the River, had been with a woman he’d been stupid enough to marry, shit, nearly twenty years ago now. She’d spent all the dough he’d earned at the packing plant, nagged him halfway crazy and had doled out tenth rate strictly flat-on-her-back sex like she was opening the gates of fucking paradise. She’d been as devoted and faithful as the day was long, something she never tired of reminding him of and for which he was meant to b
e eternally grateful. The day she’d told him she was pregnant Agry had silently packed his green kitbag in front of her blotchy tear-stained, bleating face and pulled out of town on an eastbound freight. Despite all the crazy stunts he’d pulled since then, including burning down B block to get Claudine back, nothing in the history of his life mystified him so much as the fact that he’d married Marsha.
Since then he’d preferred his women to have a wide streak of bitch in them. At least they were only after what was in your wallet – and if you were lucky your pants – and not in ripping off the next forty years of your fucking life. And it kept a man on his toes. Plus the sex was better and what the fuck else did a man need a woman for? He couldn’t think of a single thing. And even having said that the best sex Agry had ever had was in prison. And the best sex he’d ever had in prison was with Claudine. While his men took the penitentiary apart Agry drank bonded bourbon and fucked Claudine for fifty-five minutes straight, struggling with the sulphate that delayed his frantic need to come, before finally ejaculating in a violent spasm that almost wrenched his guts from their moorings.
For a few moments afterwards his throat had been swollen and he’d almost felt like crying without knowing why. Now he realised that he felt full. For the first time in his life he felt full. He kissed Claudine on the nape of the neck – her high yellow skin beaded with his sweat beside him, luminous in the candlelight, and Claudine murmured. And the fullness felt good.
Nev Agry hadn’t drifted into professional crime; he’d chosen it. He’d decided on that freight train that marriage was the last time he’d ever drift anywhere. He’d hitched up with a couple of hard cases he’d met in the brig during his military punishment and had robbed a bank in Starkville, Mississippi. A combination of intelligence, will and belligerence had made him the natural leader of their small band and Nev had liked it. For eight years he’d lived high off the hog on the proceeds of a series of small-town bank jobs: Montana, Florida, Michigan, never the same state twice. During that time he’d killed five men: one civilian, two bank guards, a deputy sheriff and one of his partners who’d objected too strongly to the size of Nev’s cut. The first and last time he’d hit a bank in Texas, in Sulphur Springs, he’d left one cop paralysed from the waist down and another with a titanium plate in his skull. Thirty-five years to life.